Live Ask Me Anything #10 - Topics Covered:

Summary of today’s episode - 01:07

Sleep from an Evolutionary perspective - 04:00

How the light bulb f*cked up everything - 06:26

Why do we have Daylight Savings Time? - 07:27

Circadian Rhythms and Sleep Aids - 08:16

The single biggest issue disrupting sleep stages - 09:11

The different sleep stages - 09:55

What is Lucid Dreaming? - 13:50

How I achieved 100% Sleep Quality - 16:10

The 8 things I did to achieve 100% Sleep Quality - 18:25

How screens are ruining your sleep quality - 20:00

Hacks to block blue light on screens - 23:36

Eat a Keto meal 1-2 hours before bed - 26:09

How overhead lights are ruining your sleep - 27:07

Drink specific teas before bed - 28:47

Sleep on a bed of nails? - 30:38

Sleep Meditation - 31:52

Why I use a sleep mask - 33:00

Have a set bedtime! - 34:30

The #1 thing you can do to guarantee a good morning routine - 35:52

How to handle a graveyard shift job - 36:32

How long does caffeine stay in your system? - 38:57

Is WiFi ruining your sleep? - 39:52

How to sleep well while traveling - 40:50

How my dad made me a successful entrepreneur - 41:44

Listen to the Podcast:

Show Notes and Resources:

- Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga - Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming - Inception Movie - Join The Clovis Academy Facebook Group! - Lucid Dreaming: A Beginner's Guide by Tim Ferriss - Sleep Cycle App - Oura Ring Sleep Monitor and Fitness Tracker - F.lux for Desktop - TrueDark Blue Blockers - Fashion Friendly Blue Blockers - How to make your iPhone screen Red! - Justin's insane ARX workout - Digest & Rest: The Perfect Paleo Powder - Red Lights for your Home - Dots to cover LED lights - Rishi Turmeric Ginger Tea - Doc Parsley's Sleep Remedy - Sleep Induction Mat - Bulletproof - Headspace App for Sleep Meditation - Brain.fm App - Sleep Headphones for Brain.fm - Dream Essentials Sleep Mask - Dohm White Noise Sleep Machine

 

 

FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

 

 

What's up, everybody? Welcome to Clovis Live: Ask me anything Number 10. That's right! We're already 10 weeks, 10 episodes into this. This is our regular weekly live. Ask Me Anything, Wednesday nights. 

 

This is live, "kind of", this week is a little bit different. Right now, as you're watching this, I'm actually on a plane. I'm on a plane watching this with you, which means I get to interact with you. Assuming everything goes according to plan with Southwest Wifi. We hope the wifi is reliable up there. If so, I'm actually going to be interacting with you as this video plays. So instead of a live Q and A, if you have questions throughout this, Ask Me Anything, you can just ask them in the comments and hopefully, fingers crossed. I'll be right there with you, responding to your comments in real-time. So you get to watch me live, and I can respond to my own comments live. Interesting! 

 

I'm basically just going to put a bunch of comments and go, “this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.”

 

Live Ask Me Anything Number 10, is called Sleep Hacking and Personal Freedom. 

 

I'm really excited about this one because it's a super, super, super important topic. There are a lot of misconceptions about sleep. Sleep is one of the most paleo principles that I can think of from an evolutionary standpoint. We're gonna talk about sleep. We're gonna talk about how to improve your sleep. We're going to talk about an article that I actually wrote. God, now probably three years ago. I believe this one; I think it was 2015. It would've been 2016, but it's an article I wrote called Sleep Hacking; it's a two-part series. 

How I achieve 100% sleep quality. So that means I track my sleep quality, and I track the different things that affect my sleep quality. And eventually ended up with 100% sleep quality, which is obviously the holy grail of sleep quality. Now notice I keep saying sleep quality. I'm not saying sleep length, right? Length doesn't really matter as much as you think. 

We're going to talk about sleep hacking. We're going to get into personal freedom. So for those of you that follow us, that are members of the Clovis Academy, which is free. Join Clovis Academy, facebook.com/groups/clovisacademy. Check that out. We'll put a link in the show notes. Those are either in the Clovis academy. Those of you that follow us on social media, on Instagram @iamclovis, we've been talking a lot about freedom. This concept of freedom is so important. And the reason why freedom has come up is that many people look at a guy like me who's a "health nut", a health guy, right? And they think that my life is restrictive. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

 

I have more freedom than the average person in leaps and bounds in ways that I can't even explain to you until you've lived it. Once you get to the level of freedom that I have, you really understand the freedom you were lacking in your day to day decision making with foods, fitness, sleep, scheduling and all these things. It's really, really important to build freedom for yourself through lifestyle design. We're going to talk about freedom. Discipline equals freedom. We're going to talk about how sleep ties into freedom. I'm going to talk about how you can optimize these things through minor tweaks and tricks. I'm gonna give you like eight to 10 different tricks to improve these things. If you do two of them, you'll see a significant improvement in your overall sleep quality, and that's a very good thing. 

Before we do that, remember, if you're on Facebook, click the share button, share it to your feed. Just click share now and public. If you're on Instagram, leave us some comments. The more comments, the better. In Facebook click, the like button, the thumbs up button, the hearts, the smiles. Do all of the things, and tag your friends. If you have a friend who just has a terrible sleep quality and is always complaining about being tired. Tag them in the comments right now and bring them into this Facebook live to learn too. And again, I'm available for comments assuming we have wifi. I hope this works out. 

Let's dive in! Ask Me Anything Live Episode 10: Sleep Hacking and Personal Freedom. 

First things first, I want to talk about the science of the sleep thing. This is really where paleo kicks in. If you've seen any of my Ask Me Anythings before, you know, I'm not dogmatic about nutrition; am I a paleo guy? Yes. Am I a low lectin guy? Yes. Am I a low carb guy? Yes. Am I a ketogenic guy? No. Am I a vegan, vegetarian guy? No. 

 

There are specific camps that I've volunteered for. Whatever camp you're in, don't be dogmatic about it because we can optimize all of these things. If you're a vegan for animal rights reasons. Cool! Let me help you optimize. Let me make sure that you don't die while serving animal rights. I can help you with that. I respect your decision, right? It's very, very moral, and it's a great decision. Let me help you, right? 

 

I don't get dogmatic about this stuff. But what I do believe in is the fundamental paleo principles of getting back to human nature. Where we came from? From an evolutionary standpoint. The reason why I say that as paleo was not about how much should you eat? How much fruit you eat, whether you're eating refined carbohydrates. That's not what paleo is. Paleo is a lifestyle design. I talk about this lifestyle design all the time, and none more so than sleep. Really! From a paleolithic standpoint. So we're looking at the paleolithic era, our ancestors. The reason why we're looking at this is that there's no possible way that human evolution could keep up with technological evolution, right? 

 

The growth of technology has been exponential. To give you a little example of this, if you were to take the entire history of mankind, of human beings, as we know them, and you look at it as a football field. Now the amount of time from the first human being to now. The last inch on the last line of that football field would be the amount of time human beings have had agriculture and grow their own food. That's how long agriculture has been around. And agriculture is what came along and screwed up everything in terms of human health, right? This entire football field were hunter-gatherers the whole time scavenging, doing whatever we can. We've been fire. We learned how to cook agriculture is still that little sliver. 

Now, if you want to talk about the amount of time that we've had things like feedlot cattle, technology and electricity. You're talking about one sheet of paper-thin on the last line of the entire football field. That is insane! This stuff is so new. You can't even wrap your head around it. This is a blink in the grand scheme of things. 

 

We don't actually know how technology affects us long-term. How does this play into sleep? The invention of the light bulb. Now from paleolithic standpoints, we could really only operate during the day. Why? Because we're at a huge disadvantage at nighttime. You want to find a cave at nighttime, and your a** has to hide so you don't get eaten by Jaguar, right? Because these are nighttime predators. They have a huge advantage. We have to avoid them, right? 

 

There's also another reason. This gets a little woo-woo. Bear with me here, but they do talk about things called genetic memories or DNA coding. There is a reason why little kids all across the planet are afraid to be in a dark room by themselves. They're scared of things that go bump in the night. We're not designed for darkness. Now the light bulb comes along and changes all of that, right? So now we have a light bulb. Now we can work 24 hours a day, and that's what we do. We have a 24-hour news cycle. We have 24-hour work. We have a night shift. We have a day shift. We have a graveyard shift, all these things, but it hasn't been around long enough for us to really absorb how detrimental this has been to human health, right? 

 

To give you an example, daylight savings time, we just went through it this week. This week was spring forward, right? Daylight savings time exists for farmers. Now in the early 1900s, 40% of Americans lived on a working farm. 40%, almost half the population, lived on a working farm. Now it's less than 2% of all people in America. We still have daylight savings time that comes along twice a year and screws everybody up. It's literally useless. We don't need it anymore, but we haven't evolved, right? This is the same thing with nutrition. Nutrition science is decades behind where it should be, right? We talk about this all the time. These things are not evolving the way that they should. 

What started as great ideas, "Hey, more productive work hours with the light bulb, right?" We can do more! Of course, civilization, as we know, wouldn't exist without a light bulb, but it's messing up our circadian rhythm. I'm going to talk about all of that. So if we look at circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms are regulated naturally. They're regulated with the sun. I want to get into that. Now, the disruption of circadian rhythms has led to increased pharmaceutical sales, just like nutrition problems. So 12 million Americans in polls in the last 30 days, 12 million Americans have used some sort of pharmaceutical sleep aid in the last 30 days. That's a staggering number of people, 12 million people taking a sleep aid because they can't sleep naturally. 

Sleep is as natural as anything comes. You get tired. You lay, you close your eyes, you go to sleep. But we continually disrupt it with modern technology. Another poll says that 30% of the US population struggles with sleep, whether it's trouble falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep or straight up insomnia. You have 30% of people dealing with that issue. As I said, we're going to talk about all the disruptors that play into this. There's one issue that I see as the number one single most significant issue when it comes to disrupting sleep stages. I want to talk about the different sleep stages. 

 

The number one disruptor of deep sleep, which is your most restorative sleep, and again, we'll talk about this. It's not REM sleep. Everybody confuses the two. Deep sleep is your most restorative sleep. Number one disruptor is what you're looking at right now: your laptop, phone, Kindle, tablet, or whatever it might be. Screens.

 

So let's talk about sleep stages. And then we're going to jump into the screen debate because it's the number one thing. I'm going to walk you through all the steps I took to achieve 100% sleep quality. 

 

Number one is the removal of screens before bed. 

 

These are the different stages of sleep that your body enters into every single night. So stage one isn't actually sleeping. 

Stage one is falling asleep. The beginning of sleep, as it's referred to, it's a non REM sleep cycle. When you're laying there, and you can't really keep your eyes open, your muscles are getting relaxed. You might start thinking of some weird thoughts. You're kind of drifting off to sleep. 

That puts you in stage two. 

Stage two is beginning sleep. You actually have fallen asleep at this point, but there's really no dreaming. It's a very, very light stage of sleep, right? So your muscles are relaxing. You're actually in sleep now. And a good way to think about it is this is about 15 minutes into sleep. If you were to go and a phone call, you could wake up, grab your phone. Looking who's on the screen, hit the answer button go, "hello." And the person on the other line probably wouldn't even know that you were asleep. It's just a very light, light, light stage of sleep. After that, assuming you didn't get a phone call, you would enter stages three and four. 

 

Now stages three and four, for the sake of simplification, are both deep sleep cycles. Now, you've entered into a deep sleep. Deep sleep is the most restorative sleep. This is the most important sleep cycle. A lot of people confuse this. One of the biggest misconceptions I see in the world of sleep is people think that REM sleep, which is the dream stage of sleep. They think that REM sleep is deep sleep. That's not true!

 

I had a really bad night's sleep because I didn't get any REM sleep. It's not true, right? REM sleep is when you're dreaming. Your brain is very, very active. In stages, three and four, the deep sleep stages, your brain and muscular activity is reduced to almost nothing. I mean, you're essentially paralyzed. You're not going to be tossing and turning. You're not going to be dreaming. What's happening in the deep sleep stage? It's like a Zamboni, a hockey rink. You ever been to a hockey game? They got to get fresh ice, right? So it's basically your whole body head to toe is going through repair and maintenance mode. It's going, "We need to fix this. We need to fix this. It's scanning your body going. Here are all the things we need to fix. We need to kill that cell. We need to remove this, remove that." 

 

This is where your muscles recover. Let's say you're lifting heavy weights or having a tough day job or something like that. This is when you're recovering. This is why deep sleep is so important. This is about 45 minutes into your first sleep cycle. So you go through stages one, two into three and four. You're now in a deep sleep, about 45 minutes in. And a good way to think of this is if you get a phone call at this time, it's really going to suck, right? Your phone rings. You go, "Where am I?" Grabbed your phone, and you're like, "Ooh," thumbing in your hand, you're having trouble getting the answer button. You can answer. You say, "hello." The person on the other line is instantly going to know that they woke you up. 

You won't be able to hide it, right? So you're getting just woken up. This is another reason. We'll talk about the alarms later, but another reason why alarms can be so terrible for you. If you're not on a good schedule is because when an alarm wakes you up at deep sleep, it's going to change your whole day. Literally, you're going to be a jerk that day. That is, waking up on the wrong side of the bed is really getting woken up out of a deep sleep state. Okay? So that's stages three and four. 

Stage five is your REM sleep. REM sleep is dream sleep. This is when all the dreaming happens. So it's rapid eye movement. That's what REM stands for. So you went to rapid eye movement. The brain is incredibly active, and this is where all your dreaming happens. Your brain actually builds long-term memories during REM sleep. 

It's really, really interesting. What happens is you have sleep stages, and sometimes I use them interchangeably. I'm sorry, I think it's confusing, but you have these sleep stages. Stages one through five, and then you have sleep cycles. 

 

You're going to go stage one, two, three, four, five. And then you're going to start over stage one, two, three, four, five. And you start over stage one, two, three, four, five. So ideally, in an eight hour night of sleep, you should pass through all these five stages at five different times. So five different cycles of sleep cycle being one through five. Stages one through five. You do that five times throughout the night. So if you notice in the middle of the night, you wake up, she had to go to the bathroom. You probably woke up in like sleep because if you're in a deep sleep, your body's not even going to register that has to go to the bathroom. 

 

All those functions are shut down, right? So when you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you probably came, just came out of REM sleep and are starting back at stage one with light sleep. So those are the different stages of sleep. 

 

Now, I know so much about these different dream states because I spent two years of my life practicing lucid dreaming. I don't know if any of you know what lucid dreaming is. I could literally do an entire AMA just on lucid dreaming. I practice it for about two years. The idea is to lengthen your REM sleep stage. You want the REM sleep to be as long as it can be as long as possible, really? So like on your fourth and fifth sleep cycle. So this would be like, 5:00 AM or 6:00 AM, that kind of thing, early, early morning hours, while you're still asleep, the REM cycles get longer as the night progresses. 

Lucid dreaming tends to happen in the early, early week, early morning hours. Right? So if you don't know what lucid dreaming is, picture the movie inception with Leonardo DiCaprio. I studied lucid dreaming for two years, got to the point where I could do it pretty consistently. It involved supplements, it involved reading a boatload of books, and it involved daily practices. Actually, waking practices to be able to determine reality from non-reality. It's really, really interesting. Lucid dreaming, essentially, when you become lucid in a dream, it's not a vivid dream. A lot of people have vivid dreams and think that they lose a dream. When you get into a lucid dream, you literally are aware, like I'm in my bed right now, I'm dreaming, and I can do whatever I want. You can spin the world faster. You can fly. You can make your friends show up and hang out with you. You can visit different cities by flying. It's unbelievable. Lucid dreaming is incredible.

 

Now lucid dreaming is really tricky and real woo-woo. For example, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Tim Ferris, but he has a pretty famous article that he wrote about lucid dreaming. He would do lucid dream practices to dreaming every night. And he would practice and train with a world-renowned wrestling coach in his lucid dreams. And then, in reality, in waking life, he went undefeated that wrestling season, just beat absolutely everybody. Other people use lucid dreaming to literally teleport to countries that speak different languages. They practice speaking different languages to become fluent in waking life. Lucid dreaming is crazy, crazy interesting. It got me to a lot of stuff. I was reading a book called, I think it was Dream Yoga or Lucid Dream Yoga. I had a flight out to Peru, where I went to the jungle with many shamans and studied lucid dreaming there, along with other things and jungle bruise and all sorts of fancy stuff, right? I've gone deep, deep, deep into the dream space. 

 

Now, let's get into how I achieved 100% sleep quality. First things first, how do I know I got 100% sleep quality? Well, I have to track and quantify my sleep. What I used at the time back in, I think it was 2015. I used an app called Sleep Cycle. Sleep cycle is free. You can get an iPhone. I believe you can get in an Android, as well. It uses either or both your microphone and accelerometer on your phone to measure your sleep stages. I find the accelerometer to be far more accurate, but for some reason, the app recommends you use the microphone. I don't understand that. So like I sleep with a noise machine, right? There's no use in me using my microphone, but anyway, so you need to track. Now the best tracker I've ever found is the Oura Ring. That's O U R A. I'm gonna try really hard to get a discount code for the Oura Ring for all of you, Clovis people. 

 

The Oura ring is incredible. It looks like a male's wedding band, which is a small ring, and it measures your heart rate and measures your HRV. It measures all your sleep cycles. What it does is it gives you a percentage of time that you're in each sleep stage. For instance, deep sleep, the most essential restorative aspect of sleep, you want to be spending 20% of your sleep time in that stage. Now that means about an eight-hour night's sleep. You're talking between 1.6 and two hours of deep sleep time. That's 20% of your total sleep time, the most restorative. So what's great about something like an Oura ring or sleep cycle that can track your different sleep stages is you get to quantify how things affect your sleep quality, which is what I did. 

So throughout, I think I have 700 and something nights logged on the sleep cycle. I tracked everything. Did I drink caffeine after 1:00 PM? Did I do intense physical activity or a workout like CrossFit or something after 4:00 PM? Did I have a large meal before bed? Did I have dark chocolate before bed? Did I have sex before bed? You can literally quantify anything that you want to quantify. I basically know how everything affects my sleep quality, and I can adjust accordingly. I can try to replicate the things I did that improve my sleep quality and minimize the things I did to prevent sleep quality. I'll walk you through it. These are the eight things that I did, and I wrote an article about this, but the writing is not up on the Clovis blog. I'm going to update this. 

 

It's been a couple of years now. There are some different tools and tricks that I've learned since then. I can update and throw in an updated version of this sleep hacking article that I did. 

1. Turn off all screens, all screens, everything at least one hour before bed. 
2. I ate a small ketogenic meal one to two hours before bed. 
3. Turn off all overhead lights. 

We're going to talk about this. I actually use red lights in my house past a specific time. I am the guy on the street whose house looks like a serial killer house, which doesn't bother me. Okay. So that's number three, 

 

4. I read before bed under a red light, and that is a fiction book. You don't want to read a business book or an investing book or change your life for a good book or something like that because your brain will start spinning. You're having a hard time falling asleep. 

 

5. I drink turmeric tea. This is a specific, random turmeric tea that I had with a little bit of raw honey. I'll walk you through raw honey. As you know in the Clovis academy, don't get all excited and start putting three tablespoons of honey in your drink and say, "Justin said, you're going to have sugar." No, we'll talk about it—details matter. 
6. I use an induction mat. I use the Bulletproof brand. I'll walk you through that as well. It's basically a glorified bed of nails that you lay on. 

 

7. Sleep meditation. I'll give you an app for that. There are a couple apps choices. Now I've updated this since the last article.

 

8. Wearing a sleep mask. I'm going to walk you through eight of these. Time allows me to get through all of these and break them down as simply as possible.

Number one - turning off all stuff screens one hour before bed. Remember the serial killer comment I made. If you drive by my house at night, you're going to see a red light coming from it. You're going to think what the hell is going on in there. Now, if you've ever driven through a neighborhood at night, which all of you have. What do you see? All the houses are lit up blue; they're emitting blue light, right? These are all people watching TV before bed. The street is literally lit up blue. These picture windows just have blue, blue, blue. Why is it so blue? The reason is all of our electronics are back backlit with something called blue light wavelengths. This is a specific spectrum of light. Now this light, thank you, inventors, of the light bulb technology, all these things that we literally were trying to emulate sunlight. That's what we're doing. 

 

Blue light wavelength is designed to emulate the sun. Now, what does the sun do? Going up and down helps us regulate circadian rhythm naturally. It makes sense that all of these blue lights that we're staring at our circadian rhythm disruptors. Electronics are the number one thing. 95% of Americans report using electronics within the hour before they go to sleep. 95% of Americans and 30% of Americans complain about terrible sleep, right? This is a huge issue. If you're driving through neighborhood, there's a ton of blue light coming out of a picture window. You don't realize what you're staring at. If you've ever been in a pitch-black room and had somebody look at their cell phone, it lights them up. Like they're on stage with a spotlight. There is so much light emitted from these little devices that we don't realize because your eyes adjust to it at the time.

What's happening is the blue light that you're staring at. Literally tricks your brain into thinking it's daytime. It could be 10:00 PM, 12:00 AM, 1:00 AM, and you're staring at the screen, watching the walking dead like a zombie. And you're wondering why I can't fall asleep? Now you might fall asleep, but you're really just passing out. You're not falling asleep. We're going to get into that as well. But this blue light is the number one circadian rhythm disruptor. What it does is suppresses melatonin production. As long as the sun is out and shining, your brain is thinking, don't produce melatonin because melatonin will put you to sleep. So even just one hour of screen time, one hour of blue light in your eyes can reduce your melatonin, the sleep hormone, the one that's in charge of your sleep quality.

It can suppress melatonin to the point of midday levels. If you watch one hour TV show at 10:00 PM at night, your melatonin's now suppressed to the point of noon. Your body thinks, "Hey, it's lunch; we're wide awake. We don't want to go to sleep." Okay? 

 

What's happening is many of you are getting such poor sleep that you're chronically sleep-deprived. You may say, "No, Justin, I watch ESPN sports center, and I fall asleep to it every single night." I have a bunch of buddies that do that. They tell me this all the time, the TV helps you fall asleep. The TV helps you fall asleep. The TV helps you pass out. It doesn't help you fall asleep. That's why you can sleep eight hours and wake up the next day and be like, "I feel like I didn't sleep at all, man."

Because you weren't getting quality sleep. It's not the length. It's the quality, right? This is a huge, huge issue. It's the same thing when people say I need two glasses of wine before bed. I need a beer before bed. I need two whiskeys before bed. It's not helping you fall asleep. It's helping you pass out. Alcohol is a huge disruptor of deep sleep cycles, TV, cell phones, all this stuff, huge disruptors of sleep cycles. 

 

A couple of things you can do. One, on your computers, if you have to work. I work late, late into the night a lot of times. Anybody who works with Clovis is on their screens all the time, right? A couple of things you can do. There's a program called F Lux. F.lux, it will start to put Amber lights. It follows the sunset, literally. The sunset in your location tracks your location. It will start to pull the blue light out of your screen and make it more amber. Now, by the time it's midnight, your screen is completely red. There's no blue light emitting from your screens. 

 

Honestly, there's probably still some blue light spectrum there, but it will help you. There's another one called IRS. It has a little more functionality and a little more confusing to use. I really recommend, and I posted a video on the Clovis academy in a pair of glasses called blue blockers. Blue blockers actually block the blue light wavelength from getting into your eyes. There are a couple of different kinds. There are these yellow ones that are a kind of amber that you could actually wear in public.

It wouldn't look that weird. There are different brands that some of them look really cool. 

 

There's a company called True Dark, and it makes day walkers and night walkers. The day walkers are kind of yellow. It is great for looking at screens, doing work during the day. If you wear them all day looking at your screen, you're going to sleep better at night, and you can still see everything pretty clearly. 

 

Now the night walkers are red. They're literally red. You put these things on; they cover your eyes. They look like goggles, and it tricks your brain into thinking it's pitch dark. You'll be able to walk around your house, and you know, you could make some food. You could look at your computer. You can answer emails and things like that, but it gets really tricky because it's blocking out so many different wavelengths of light that you can't tell what's what. If you're a graphic designer or something, you're in trouble because it's going to skew all of your colors and everything. It's going to be really, really tough to work with these things on. But if you're an average person and you really just need to watch that last episode of House of Cards before you go to bed, throw these blue blockers on. It's going to make a huge, huge, huge difference in your life. 

 

Blue blockers are really cool. That's kind of a bit of hack you can do. There's also a hack with the triple-click button on your iPhone. You can triple-click your home button, and you can use color filters to turn your screen to red. If anyone's ever been to my house at night or anything like that. They noticed that my phone screen is always red. You can put a color filter that pulls all the blue out. This is not the same as night shift mode. Night shift mode does very, very little bit. This is Apple saying, "Hey, we're a fancy, we know what health is." And it really doesn't do sh**. 

 

Anyway, I'll put a link on how to make that color filter on your iPhone. If you're on Google, Android, I don't know what to tell you that I never used one of those. Okay. So that's the number one screens before bed. That is the most important. I can't harp on this enough. Turn your screen off an hour before bed and just read a book, not a Kindle or a tablet. Just read a book. I promise you your sleep will improve with that one thing. If you only do one thing from this list, that is it. One thing, right? 

Number two, keto meal. 

When you're in the deep sleep cycle, your body's recovering your muscles. You guys may seem that we're doing this mass gains protocol. I'm doing these crazy ARX workouts that just completely destroy my body. Your muscle growth doesn't happen while you're working out. It happens while you sleep. You need to make sure that your body has enough to repair itself, to repair cellular damage while you sleep. Even the guy like Terry Crews, the most Jack dude on planet earth, who practices intermittent fasting, only eats an eight-hour window. He's still slamming 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 calories. Whatever he's eating, he's still eating the same amount of calories, just eating them in a small window. So when he's asleep, his body has what it needs inside of itself to repair all the muscle tissues and everything and grow, right? I did a keto meal at the time I did the experiment. It was grass-fed beef and grass-fed butter. It was like a quarter pound of grass-fed beef, something a little like hour or two before bed. I'm staying real light just helps me repair my muscles while I'm sleeping, right? Healthy fats and protein. 

 

Number three, overhead lights. 

 

This goes back to the blue light wavelength. I'm looking at a light right now for filming that is projecting blue light onto me. There's a screen in front of me that's projecting blue light at me. Your overhead lights do the same thing. Almost all of your overhead lights are emitting blue light as well. So one blue blocker, again, that helps. That helps big time. If you put blue blockers on, but number two, I use red lights in my house as we talked about. 

 

I have a lamp on my bed; that's literally a red light. It's a light bulb that emits red, right? There's no blue wavelength light coming from this whatsoever. If I sit down on my bed with a fiction book and open it up, I can read perfectly. It's very plenty bright enough. It lights my whole room up red, and I can read that fiction book, and I'll notice myself start dozing off just, "oh man." You just start feeling sleepy. It's like, you're in a Cave. Reading fiction under the red light. Turn off the overhead lights. If you want, literally, you can go on Amazon right now and search like red lights for your house, or like Amber lights for your home, or no blue lights. If you just Google, like no blue light things like this, you can find all sorts of products that are designed for this.

They also have the electrical tape. They have tabs, these little sticky tabs for all these things. If you have a fan going at night and there's a green led light that's lit up, you can cover it with a tab. It's really that important. They did studies on this. We'll get to this in the sleep master part, but your room really should be set up to be as dark as possible. Okay, so you want to turn off all the overhead lights, try to use red lights if you can. Reading is very important before bed, but as I said, don't read some crazy in-depth involved book about how to invest in cryptocurrency right before bed because your wheels are going to spin. You're not going to fall asleep. Reading under the red light helps even more. 

At the time I was drinking teas before bed, I was experimenting with these different teas. I remember I did lucid dreaming supplements. There's like dream leaf, lucid dream leaf, all these different things that you can try, herbal teas. The one that I found at the time was turmeric tea. I can't think of it. Yeah, but I'll find it. I'll put it in the show notes, but I was drinking a turmeric tea, and I was putting just half a tablespoon of raw honey. We're talking seven to eight grams of sugar in this. The reason for that is it going to get converted to glucose in your body, right? And a certain percentage of your brain requires glucose for survival, right? I mean, you can get away with very, very, very small amounts of glucose. Like we say, green leafy vegetables will convert themselves. You have plenty to work with, even if you're getting only 10% of your calories from net carbohydrates.

Glucose before bed can actually the brain while you sleep. It can improve deep sleep. This is a tiny little hack. Now at the time, as I said, I use turmeric tea with a little bit of honey, just half a tablespoon. Some people do up to a tablespoon, but I'm not a kind of the sugar guy, and I'm not into that. Since then, I had a conversation with Robb Wolf, which was later recommended by Dr Peter Attia. Both people who I look up to immensely, they've never steered me wrong with the recommendations. This is a product called Doc Parsley's sleep remedy. Doc Parsley's sleep remedy tastes like apple cider. Basically, you heat it up at night. It's got vitamin D; it's got a little, a little bit of melatonin. And then it's just got some other amino acids, right?

She drinks this before bed. It becomes a part of your bedtime routine, which is very important. Routine is important, and we'll talk about that. It helps you sleep—great, great, great product. Can't recommend it enough. The only issue is it's going to cost you, I think, between 40 and 50 bucks a month. It's pricey. It's a costly product. If you really have issues with sleep and you want to kickstart, try this if you can afford it. 

 

The other thing is, and I've kind of come away from this since I wrote the article, but I think it's important to touch on. There's something called an induction mat. There are different brands of this. I got my induction mat from Bulletproof. It's called the Bulletproof sleep induction mat. It's a mat that rolls out like a yoga mat, but it has all these plastic spikes on it. It looks like a torture device, right? You lay it on the ground. 

 

I would read a book until the point where I'd start dozing off, right? And then I'd actually get out of bed or put it in bed and do it on the ground, in bed wherever you want to do. I like it better on a hard floor rather than a mattress. You lay on it. Now, when you first lay on it, it kind of feels like a bed of spikes. It doesn't feel great at first, and your body freaks out. This kind of spikes your sympathetic nervous system. You're a fight or flight, right? This is kind of your fight like, "Ooh, what's happening." 

 

Then the body realizes as you lay on this for 10 minutes. Within the first three minutes, it realizes we're not in danger and your body just kind of settles and relax, and your muscles relax.

It's a little bit like acupuncture, but without the puncture part, right? Your just body kind of relaxes, and it really spikes your parasympathetic nervous system. This is the rest and digest part of your nervous system. It really, really helps you relax. Be careful. I have fallen asleep on the sleep induction mat and woken up an hour later in immense pain. My back feels like a sunburn cause I fell asleep on this thing. It's an interesting little trick. Skip the induction mat if you want to. It's not necessary. You can just go right from reading to the next step, which is sleep meditation. You'll fall asleep. Sleep like a baby. 

Sleep meditation. I used an app called Headspace. Headspace is a great meditation app that you guys are probably familiar with because everybody and their mom are doing Headspace now. Headspace has an actual specific sleep meditation, and he just kind of walks you through.

It's a guided meditation. Once you do it a couple of times, you know, by heart, so you don't need the app anymore. You can really just kind of do this meditation. I'm not gonna do the meditation here, but grab the Headspace app and learn the sleep meditation. It really, really helps. It really slows your brain down and gets those thoughts out of your head. I think a lot before I fall asleep, and this sleep meditation really helped me. Since then, I found another service that I use on my computer called brain.fm. Brain.fm is pretty awesome. They have an app. They actually have headphones that come with it. They're like a strap with really, really thin little speakers, so you can actually sleep on the sides of your head. They won't mess you up. These are binaural beats combined with music or combined with relaxation sounds. This works really well. It works really well for travelling, works really well for airplanes as well. Those are a couple of things you can do in the sleep meditation space. 

 

The other thing I do is sleep with a sleep mask. I have my room set up to be as dark as possible, but it's tough to get a room pitch dark. You need to get blackout curtains. It's really tough to do so. A sleep mask helps. When I was talking about before is they've done studies where they'll take a test subject. These sleep studies in a pitch-black room take a little laser pointer light and shine it on the back of their knee. It disrupts their sleep cycles. That's how serious it is when you're sleeping.

We do not give human skin enough credit. It's the same thing; we talk about chemicals and everything. It's like literally what you put on your skin is going in your body. That's literally how we synthesize vitamin D. The sun on our skin gets converted into vitamin D. That's crazy! The human body is insane, right? And then we put sunscreen and deodorant, and all this bull**** on that's killing us. Okay. 

 

Anyway, I digress, right? But a little bit of light in the back of your knee can disrupt your sleep cycles. Try to get your room as dark as you possibly can. That's what I was talking about. If you have LEDs, a smoke detector or something that has led on it. Try to cover that with a little bit of electrical tape; just cover the light. You don't need to turn it off or anything, so you don't die in a fire, but you can cover the light, right? Get it as pitch black as you can, and wear a sleep mask. This is also really important for travelling because hotel rooms are terrible for light. Light gets through their curtains. They have red LED lights everywhere. Light comes in from one of the doors. Wear a sleep mask; it really, really, really helps, right? So the sleep mask is pretty cool, and other disruptors, okay? 

 

I wanted to touch on some other disruptors besides the major ones like cell phones and things like that. 

 

1. This is where we talk about freedom. This is where this all ties into freedom—lack of schedule. If you're a parent, your kids probably have a bedtime. I was about to say, all kids have a bedtime, but it depends on your parenting approach. Some people have set bedtimes for their kids; I guess others don't. A lot of people will get this advice as parents. When they have a little kid is set up a routine, you want the child's body to know it's time for bed. If you're bedtime seven and you're a four-year-old, we're gonna put your PJ's on at 6:15. At 6:30, you're going to brush your teeth. By 6:45, you're going to be in bed, and we're going to be reading a bedtime story. By 7:00, you're out like a light, right? Once the baby or the child knows that the PJ's are on, they know it's about time for bed. It triggers something in their head, and they start releasing melatonin.

It's really, really good to have a set schedule, but most parents will put their kid in bed and then stare at Kevin Spacey and House of Cards for the next three until they pass out in front of the TV. It doesn't make any sense. Again, there's not childhood nutrition and adult nutrition. There's just nutrition. There's grownup food and kid food. It's all the same. Routine scheduling is the same thing. If a routine and schedule are suitable for your kid, it's probably good for you, right? You need a bedtime routine. 

 

One of the first articles I ever got published was published in fitness RX for men. It was 10 tips to improve your morning routine and prime your body for success. Now that article got a lot of attention. It was the most shared I've ever had. Still, in reality, the number one thing you can do to guarantee a successful morning routine is to have a solid nighttime routine. Roll the clock back. That's very important. Your day is going to suck. Your morning is going to suck if you didn't handle it the night before. If you just pass out in front of the TV, you're going to have one of those, "I woke up on the wrong side of the bed mornings," right? Because your circadian rhythm is completely disrupted and thrown off, right? 

Let's talk about this. There was talk about this in the Clovis Academy. Alot of people that I work with are on the graveyard shift. I've been a professional musician for the last 15 years. I used to perform six nights a week. I never went to bed before five o'clock in the morning ever. My sleep was disrupted entirely, completely screwed. My circadian rhythm was entirely off. I'm looking at a GPS, driving home from a gig at 4:30 in the morning and going to bed at five.

Here's what I'll say about this. I understand it's not an option for many of you. It wasn't an option for me. I'm a professional musician. I still perform on the weekends. On the weekends, I'm going to bed at 4:30, 5:00, 5:30 in the morning, Friday and Saturday, right? If you can get another job, get another job. I know that sounds crazy. If you're a night shift nurse and they can make you a day shift nurse. Shift it as soon as you possibly can. Now I was a graveyard shift person for 15 years. I still am two nights a week. The rest of the time, I'm pretty normal up by 6:30, 7:00, 7:30 in the morning and getting eight hours of sleep. I'm really, really meticulous about this. I can kind of afford the two days of screwed up. Even though I really can't because I'm telling you everything skyrockets. Your risk of everything goes through the roof. Your risk of depression goes up. Your risk of cancer goes up. Your risk of Alzheimer's goes up. Your risk of heart attack goes up. 

 

Everything goes up when you are a graveyard shift worker. If you can get out of it. Get out of it! If you can't, you really, really need to put these into play. Even if you're out before bed is four o'clock in the morning, you need to start doing some of these things. Avoid the screens; make sure you're in total darkness, especially if you're falling asleep when the sun is up. You need to have your room built like a cave and used to be as dark as you possibly can, and still, try to get your body on a set schedule. That's the tricky thing with my schedule on the weekend; I shift everything. It's weird. Like I had this perfect schedule getting eight hours of sleep up at 6:30 or 7:30, depending on the time I go to bed, then the weekend comes, screws it all up.

I'm probably doing shots of tequila on stage and doing my body a huge disservice. If you can get out on a graveyard shift, get out of it. It is drastically bad for your health, okay? Not to scare you, but sorry. I've dealt with her for 15 years, and I'm pretty good. 

 

I mean, you can definitely mitigate some of these risks, but you got to get the nutrition right. You gotta get the fitness right. You got to get the sleep right. You got to get the darkroom. You don't have much wiggle room with your health if you're a graveyard shift worker. It can lead to a lot of problems, especially cortisol and storing belly fat. That's a big issue. 

 

Another thing, caffeine, I love caffeine. I've gotten plenty of genetics testing done. I'm actually a fast metabolizer of caffeine and of alcohol.

Those things don't really affect me. If you're a slow metabolizer of alcohol and you can get a quick 23andme test to figure that out. You probably shouldn't have any caffeine ever. Still, you specifically shouldn't have caffeine, especially a slow metabolizer, nine hours before bedtime. Why? Because the half-life of caffeine is around five to six hours. What does that mean? If you take a hundred milligrams of caffeine, five to six hours later, you will have 50 milligrams of caffeine in your system. That's the half-life. Half-life is the amount of time it takes your body to remove half of something that's been ingested, right? Even eight, nine hours later, if you had a hundred milligrams of caffeine, you might still be dealing with 25 milligrams, caffeine in your system. It's not a big deal. You'll probably still fall asleep, but it will disrupt your sleep stages. Like your deep sleep will be a little bit less, assuming you have caffeine in your system. So watch out for caffeine. That's a really, really big one. 

Another one that's probably less of a concern and the jury's kind of out on this is EMF. That's an electromagnetic field. I personally sleep with my phone in airplane mode. Again, I'm a single guy. I'm not a parent. I'm not as worried as some people are like if your kid is off. If your kid's 15 and he's at a house party on Friday night, you probably don't want to sleep with your phone in airplane mode in case something goes wrong, right? If you can sleep with your phone in airplane mode, do it. There are some studies, and it's kind of like I said, the jury is out, but EMF really might disrupt your sleep cycles, and it could cause some other health problems as well.

I think that that's one of those things we haven't evolved with technology. There's no way for us to keep up with technology. There's no way for human evolution to keep up with technology. We might find out 400 years from now that we're all growing a third ear on our forehead. It's because we had cell phones next to our head while we sleep. We don't know yet, right? We're not going to know for a long time, honestly. It's really up to you. I sleep with it in airplane mode, and I've never had anything go wrong in the middle of the night, but totally up to you. 

 

The other thing that can be disruptive has a job that requires you to travel a lot. We're traveling all the time. I'm on a plane right now. Now I'm literally commenting with you on this video from a plane.

I got back from LA less than 48 hours ago. And now we're out to Boise, Idaho. We'll be back till Friday night. So what do I do? I mitigate issues that might pop up. I still try as much as I can to keep my phone in that red light mode. I travelled with a sleep mask. If I know I'm going to be in an Airbnb, I travel with a sleep machine. It's a machine called a Dome. This little I can fit it in my backpack. It's wonderful. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. I literally travel with that. If I'm not going to travel with the dome, I'll grab brain FM and these little skinny headphone things that my dad actually showed to me. They're fantastic. You can bring those with you. If you're in a noisy hotel room or something, you know, you're not going to get a good night of sleep. You can put these headphones on. There are things you can do. You just have to be prepared, be prepared for travel. So if you can get yourself on a pretty set schedule with sleep. This ties into discipline equal freedom. This is a choice you make. I'm always talking about choices, and I'm always harping on choices. 

 

When I was a little kid, my dad, a masterful entrepreneur, did several things with me. 

 

One, he made me read Daily Affirmations from Zig Ziglar in the mirror when I was five. I would say, "My name is Justin. I am smart. I am intelligent. I am creative. I am strong." All these things, right? I'm saying them to the mirror to myself. Yeah. Probably felt weird when I was five but I was wanting to be like dad. So I did it, and he would drill something else in my head.

Life is all about choices. The more good choices you make, the more choices you will have available to you. The more bad choices you make, the fewer choices you will have available to you. This is where discipline equals freedom comes in. Is binge-watching your favorite TV show more important than your sleep? No, it's not. You can look me in the face and say, "Yeah, I love that show. It is more important to me." You're wrong. It's not more important to you. I guarantee you! Bad sleep quality is not sustainable. Eventually, your body will break down. This can lead to very, very serious health consequences. So you have to make the decision. What are you going to prioritize, your favorite TV show or your sleep? The TV shows not going anywhere. Netflix is not going anywhere. You can watch House of Cards a year from now. It's not a big deal, right? Just watch TV during the day. Please, watch TV during the day, don't fall asleep in front of the TV. This discipline equals freedom thing is so important because, for all these little tiny decisions you make, the world becomes your oyster. You wake up in the morning feeling like a million bucks. You can wake up. 

 

You go to bed a little bit earlier and wake up a little bit earlier. You can squeeze in a workout before work. You can cook a healthy breakfast instead of grabbing a doughnut at Starbucks or whatever it might be. You have more options available to you if you stick to discipline. It's very, very freeing. I give you an example, even when you travel, you make the decision to pack the things you need and you prep this ahead of time. It's the same goes for food.

Last Friday in LA, while we were trying to fly to LA from Nashville, and we had a five-hour delay. Two hours of that delay, we were stuck on a plane, and we didn't actually plan ahead. We were going to expo west and natural product show. We thought we'd be able to get plenty of food while we were there, which turned out to be wrong because the products from expo west were pretty poor. 

 

Long story short, we didn't plan ahead. We're trapped for five hours with no food, literally like nothing in our backpacks. I think I had a Taza chocolate bar. What happens? Do I get hangry? Do I get super upset? Do I feel like crap? And I'm grumpy? No, not at all because I don't get hungry. I eat when it's time to eat, not a carb addict. I'm not addicted to carbohydrates. I don't get sugar spikes and crashes, and I don't get cravings, right? That's freedom. 

 

Freedom is not, "I haven't eaten in two hours, and if I don't eat, I'm going to choose someone's face off." Right? When people tell me that they're that hungry, I get it because they are. It's incredibly painful for them. They literally feel like they're starving, but this is the idea of freedom. If you can get free from carbohydrate addiction, then if you're in a place where you can't get food, or the only thing available to you is airplane peanuts that you're not going to eat. Don't eat them. You literally just fast. That's it. You fast. We live in America. Eventually, you're going to get to a place where there's food that you can eat. 

 

For that five hours, you just fast. That's freedom; freedom plays into every single aspect of your life, but only when attached to discipline. Make enough good choices, and you will have more choices at your disposal. I hope that that makes sense. That's how sleep kind of ties into this.  

 

You can get the schedule down, make the discipline decision to turn the screens off before bed. To get a sleep mask, to drink a little bit of doc parsley tea, or to read a fiction book. Or invest in a $6 red light to go in the lamp next to your bed. There are tiny, tiny little things you can do that are literally going to change your life forever. Especially when you're stacking one, good night's sleep on top of the next.

If you have the discipline to do that, every single aspect of your life is going to change. And the other thing is, if you're currently overweight, you're going to start dropping weight. Especially if you're following the Clovis protocol, my approved foods list and all these things. Everything becomes easier. Your energy levels are more consistent. Making good choices. You literally will have more willpower. Willpower is a finite thing. You'll be able to train. You'll be able to eat right. You'll be able to be in a better mood. It just it's going to affect everything. The more you can hone in on sleep, the better. That's where this discipline equals freedom really, really plays into this. Make good decisions, free yourself from a chaotic schedule. Chaos is not freedom. Chaos is a prison sentence, okay? So clean up your life, clean up your sleep. Everything will change. I promise you. 

All right. So that's basically it. That's all I got for you this week. This is Live: Ask me anything Episode Number 10: Sleep Hacking and Personal Freedom. I hope you get a lot out of this. I know I touched on a lot, but again, as always, this will go up as a blog post. We're going to have show notes, links, resources. If I mentioned a product, I'm going to tell you how to get it. If I mentioned a supplement, I'm going to tell you how to get it. I'll put all that stuff in the show notes so you can access it after the fact. And remember, I am here with you this week. This is a really, really exciting episode because I am on a plane and I'm watching this with you. If you have comments, instead of doing the live video Q and A, where I can answer audibly, I want you to ask any questions you may have in the comments right now. If you have a question about a product. If you have want clarification on something or if you're a night shift worker and you want to talk further about that, leave the comments here. 

 

Assuming all goes well with the wifi on the plane, I'm with you right now, which is really cool. I've never been able to do that before. I can comment with you directly in real-time. If you have questions, leave them and give me comments with Live Ask Me Anything Number 10: Sleep Hacking and Personal Freedom. 

 

On top of that, if you've got something fresh in your head that you want to talk about, leave me questions that you want for next week's Q and A. We haven't decided what we're going to do that on yet. We kind of let the week dictate it. Communicate with us in the Clovis Academy, communicate with us on Instagram, communicate with us on Twitter, email justin@iamclovis.com, whatever you want to do, or give me a shout.

Let me know what you want to talk about. I kind of let you guys dictate this thing. I see what kind of questions I get week to week. And then I plan the AMA usually the day before. Whatever you want to talk about. I had somebody talked to me about cholesterol today. I love to clear up some misconceptions about cholesterol. I'd love to talk about fitness. Fitness is the one thing that I consistently see Clovis followers giving each other bad advice on. I don't mean that in the wrong way. It's just that you don't know what you don't know until you know it, right? 

We need to talk about fitness. We need to get people cleared up on fitness and how fitness works in the body. Again, if you have any questions, leave the comments. I'll be in there. Josh will be in there. We'll be answering questions back and forth, doing whatever we can, assuming that our computers and wifi are cooperating. So hopefully, I'm here with you right now on an airplane talking to you live in the comment thread. 

Leave me your comments, leave me your questions. Follow us, share this with your friends, tag your friends. If you think they want to learn how to get better sleep and just do anything you can to help me spread the message with Clovis. You want to have the approved foods list, email me, at justin@iamclovis.com. Do all the things on social media. Spread this as much as you can, help me, help others and help you. Thank you so much. Live Ask Me Anything: Sleep Hacking and Personal Freedom. Thanks for hanging out with us.